fin à ces tripotages en concluant mon mariage avec la princesse de Brunswick. La reine ne peut se consoler de ce revers; le désespoir où elle est lui fait exhaler son venin contre cette pauvre princesse. Elle a exigé de moi que je refusasse absolument ce parti, et m'a dit qu'elle ne se soucioit point que la mesintelligence recommencât entre le roi et moi.'" P. 87, 88.

The ac

The poor prince, however, confesses that he cannot say much for the intellect of his intended bride; and really does not use a much nobler language than the rest of the family, even when speaking in her presence; for on her first presentation to his sister, finding that she made no answer to the compliments that were addressed to her, the enamoured youth encourages her bridal timidity by this polite exclamation: "Peste soit de la bête-remercie donc ma sœur." count of the festivities which accompanied this marriage really excites our compassion, and is well calculated to disabuse any inexperienced person of the mistake of supposing that there can be either comfort or enjoyment in the cumbrous splendours of a court. Scanty and crowded dinners at mid-dayand formal balls and minuets immediately after, in June, followed up with dull gaming in the evening;-the necessity of being up in full dress by three o'clock in the morning to see á review and the pleasure of being stifled in a crowded tent without seeing any thing, or getting any refreshment for seven or eight hours, and to return famishing to a dinner of eighty covers; at other times to travel ten miles at a foot pace in an open carriage during a heavy rain, and then to stand shivering on the wet grass to see fireworks-to pay twenty visits of ceremony every morning, and to present and be presented in stately silence to persons whom you hate and despise. Such were the general delights of the whole court; and the princess had the additional gratification of being forced from a sick bed to enjoy them, and of undergoing the sneers of her mother, and the slights of her whole generation. Their domestic life, when these galas were over, was nearly as fatiguing, and still more lugubrious. The good old custom of famishing was kept up at table; and immediately after dinner the king had his great chair placed right before the fire, and snored in it for three hours, during all which they were obliged to keep silence, for fear of disturbing him. When he awoke, he set to smoking tobacco;-and then sat four hours at supper, listening to long stories of his ancestors, in the taste of those sermons which are prescribed to persons afflicted with insomnolency. Then the troops began their exercise under the windows before four o'clock every morning-and not only kept the whole household awake from that hour by their

firing, but sometimes sent a ramrod through the glass to assist at the princess's toilette. One afternoon the king was seized with a sort of apoplexy in his sleep, which, as he always snored extremely loud, might have carried him off without much observation, had not his daughter observed him grow black in the face, and restored him by timely application. She is equally unfortunate about the same time in her fatherin-law the margrave, who is mischievous enough to recover, after breaking a blood-vessel by falling down stairs in a fit of drunkenness. At last she gets away with great difficulty, and takes her second leave of the parental roof, with even less regard for its inhabitants than she had felt on first quitting its shelter.

Ŏn her return to Bareith, she finds the margrave quite broken in health, but extravagantly and honourably in love' with a lame, dwarfish, middle-aged lady, the sister of her ancient governess, whom he proposes to marry, to the great discomfiture of the princess and his son. They remonstrate with the lady, however, on the absurdity of such a union; and she promises to be cruel, and live single. In the mean time, one of the margrave's daughters is taken with a kind of madness of a very indecorous character; which indicates itself by frequent improprieties of speech, and a habit of giving invitations of no equivocal sort, to every man that comes near her. The worthy margrave, at first, undertakes to cure this very troublesome complaint by a brisk course of beating; but this not being found to answer, it is thought expedient to try the effect of marriage; and, that there may be no harm done to any body, they look out a certain Duke of Weimar, who is as mad as the lady-though somewhat in a different way. This prince's malady consisted chiefly in great unsteadiness of purpose, and a trick of outrageous and inventive boasting. Both the princess and her husband, however, take great pains to bring about this well-assorted match; and by dint of flattery and intimidation, it is actually carried through-though the bridegroom sends a piteous message on the morning of his wedding day, begging to be off, and keeps them from twelve till four o'clock in the morning before he can be persuaded to go to bed. In the mean time, the princess gives great offence to the populace and the preachers of Bareith, by giving a sort of masked ball, and riding occa sionally on horseback. Her husband goes to the wars, and returns very much out of humour with her brother Frederic, who talks contemptuously of little courts and little princes. The old margrave falls into a confirmed hectic, and writes billets-dour to his little lady, so tender as to

turn one's stomach; but at last dies in an edifying manner, to the great satisfaction of all his friends and acquaintances. Old Frederic promises fair, at the same time, to follow his example; for he is seized with a confirmed dropsy. His legs swell and burst, and give out so much water that he is obliged for several days to sit with them in buckets. By a kind of miracle, however, he recovers, and goes a campaigning for several years after.

The Memoirs are rather dull for four or five years after the author's accession to the throne of Bareith. She makes various journeys, and suffers from various distempers-has innumerable quarrels with all the neighbouring potentates about her own precedence and that of her attendants; fits up several villas, gives balls, and sometimes quarrels with her hus-, band, and sometimes nurses him in his illness. In 1740 the king her father dies in good earnest; and makes, it must be acknowledged, a truly heroic, though somewhat whimsical ending. Finding himself fast going, he had himself placed early in the morning in his wheel chair, and went to tell the queen to rise and see him die. He then took farewell of his children, and gave some sensible advice to his son, and the ministers and generals whom he had assembled. Afterwards he had his best horse brought, and presented it with a good grace to the oldest of his generals. He ordered all the servants to put on their new liveries; and, when this was done, he looked on them with an air of derision, and said, "Vanity of vanities!" He commanded his physician to tell him exactly how long he had to live; and when he answered, "about half an hour," he asked for a looking-glass, and said, with a smile, that he did look ill enough, and saw " qu'il ferait une vilaine grimace en mourant." When the clergymen proposed to come and pray with him, he said, " he knew already all they had to say, and that they might go about their business." In a short time after he expired in great tranquillity.

Though the new king came to visit his sister soon after his accession, and she went to return the compliment at Berlin, she says there was no longer any cordiality between them; and that she heard nothing but complaints of his avarice, his ill temper, his ingratitude, and his arrogance. She gives him great credit for talents, but entreats her readers to suspend their judgment as to the real character of this celebrated monarch, till they have perused the whole of her Memoirs. What seems to have given her the worst opinion of him, was his impolite habit of making jokes about the small domains and scanty revenues of her husband. For the two following years

she travels all over Germany, abusing all the principautés she meets with. In 1742, she goes to see the coronation of the new emperor at Francfort, and has a long negotiation about the ceremony of her introduction to the empress. After various projets had been offered and rejected, she made these three conditions:-1st. That the whole cortege of the empress should receive her at the bottom of the staircase. 2dly. That the empress herself should come to meet her at the outside of the door of her bedchamber. And, 3dly. That she should be allowed an arm-chair during the interview. Whole days were spent in the discussion of this proposition; and at last the two first articles were agreed to; but all that she could make of the last was, that she should have a very large chair without arms, and the empress a very small one with them! Her account of the interview we add in her own words.

"Je vis cette princesse le jour suivant. J'avoue qu'à sa place j'aurois imaginé toutes les étiquettes et les cérémonies du monde pour m'empêcher de paroître. L'Impératrice est d'une taille audessous de la petite, et si puissante qu'elle semble une boule; elle est laide au possible, sans air et sans grace. Son esprit répond à sa figure; elle est bigotte à l'excès, et passe les nuits et les jours dans son oratoire: les vieilles et les laides sont ordinairement le partage du bon Dieu. Elle me reçut en tremblant et d'un air si décontenancé qu'elle ne put me dire un mot. Nous nous assîmes. Après avoir gardé quelque temps le silence je commençai la conversation en français. Elle me repondit, dans son jargon autrichien, qu'elle n'entendoit pas bien cette langue et qu'elle me prioit de lui parler en allemand. Cet entretien ne fut pas long. Le dialecte autrichien et le bas-saxon sont si différens, qu'à moins d'y être accoutumé on ne se comprend point. C'est aussi ce qui nous arriva. Nous aurions préparé à rirc à un tiers par les coq-àl'âne que nous faisions, n'entendant que par-ci par-la un mot qui nous faisoit deviner le reste. Cette princesse étoit si fort esclave de son étiquette qu'elle auroit cru faire un crime de lèse-grandeur en m'entretenant dans une langue étrangère, car elle savoit le français. L'Empereur devoit se trouver à cette visite; mais il étoit tombé si malade qu'on craignoit même pour ses jours. P. 345, 346.

After this she comes home in very bad humour; and the Memoirs break off abruptly with her detection of an intrigue between her husband and her favourite attendant, and her dissatisfaction with the dull formality of the Court of Stutgard. We hope the sequel will soon find its way to the public.

Some readers may think we have dwelt too long on such a

tissue of impertinencies; and others may think an apology requisite for the tone of levity in which we have spoken of so many atrocities. The truth is, that we think this book of no trifling importance, and that we could not be serious upon the subject of it without being both sad and angry. Before concluding, however, we shall add one word in seriousness-to avoid the misconstructions to which we might otherwise be liable.

We are decidedly of opinion that monarchy, and hereditary monarchy, is by far the best form of government that human wisdom has yet devised for the administration of considerable nations, and that it will always continue to be the most perfect which human virtue will admit of. We are not readily to be suspected, therefore, of any wish to produce a distaste or contempt for this form of government; and beg leave to say, that though the facts we have now collected are certainly such as to give no favourable impression of the private manners or personal dispositions of sovereigns, we conceive that good, rather than evil, is likely to result from their dissemination. This we hold, in the first place, on the strength of the general maxim, that all truth must be ultimately salutary, and all deception pernicious. But we think we can see a little how this maxim applies to the particular case before us.

In the first place, then, we think it of service to the cause of royalty, in an age of violent passions and rash experiments, to show that most of the vices and defects which such times are apt to bring to light in particular sovereigns, are owing, not so much to any particular unworthiness or unfitness in the individual, as to the natural operation of the circumstances in which he is placed; and are such as those circumstances have always generated in a certain degree in those who have been exposed to them. Such considerations, it appears to us, when taken along with the strong and irresistible arguments for monarchical government in general, are well calculated to allay that great impatience and dangerous resentment with which nations in turbulent times are apt to consider the faults of their sovereigns; and to unite with our steady attachment and entire respect for the office, a very great degree of indulgence for the personal defects of the individual who may happen to fill it. Monarchs, upon this view of things, are to be considered as persons who are placed, for the public good, in situations where not only their comfort but their moral qualities are liable to be greatly impaired; and who are poorly paid in empty splendour, and anxious power, for the sacrifice of their affections, and of the many engaging qualities which might have blossomed in a lower region. If we look with indulgence upon